Post Spigit Merger, Mindjet Works on 'Transformative' Offering

The merger between enterprise software providers Mindjet and Spigit a year ago has produced ... well, you'll have to wait a little more for specifics.

The big reveal on what the merger will bring won't come until the company's conference next March.

But it promises to be "transformative," according to San Francisco-based Mindjet's new chief marketing officer, Kevin Cochrane, who started last month after stints as CMO at OpenText and product vice president of digital marketing Adobe.

Mindjet is expected to serve up an appetizer of its product suite next week, but the full reveal doesn't come until the March conference, Cochrane told CMSWire.

Disruptive Innovation

So what's happening at Mindjet? Each major product line is still active -- MindManager, ProjectManager and SpigitEngage. Whether or not that will change has yet to be announced.

The company's in the midst of what will be about a 20-month investment into its product offerings that began with the September 2013 merger and culminates at the March conference.

"Since the acquisition," Cochrane said, "one of the critical things that we've seen in the market is the ever-increasing importance on driving disruptive innovation within the enterprise. Too many businesses are getting disrupted by outside, external parties and entrepreneurs in the digital age competing with new digital products and competing with new strategies."

Innovation-Led Charge

Cochrane and Mindjet's also seen the rise of new executives in organizations -- or existing executives with new agendas sponsoring digital transformation.

There's the "enlightened" CIO, working with each business head implementing new digital strategies.

There's the CDO or chief digital officer, thinking about new organizational structure, organizational behavior and "entirely new business models to drive a new digital agenda."

And of course the CMO, who's taking on the digital strategy "as it relates to customer experience," Cochrane said.

It's all heightened, he added, the emphasis on innovation in the enterprise and led to the rise of innovation roles like "chief innovation officer" or "VP of innovation."

"They're putting in place cross-functional programs that basically help accelerate new product innovation that helps accelerate a transformation in customer experience that helps accelerate new business processes that are more lightweight, more agile," Cochrane said. "This helps make business more responsive to changes in the market."

Mindjet's Path

So where does this put Mindjet as a company post-Spigit merger?

R Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research, noted that Spigit handled large enterprises and big-budget innovation programs. Mindjet was more smaller departments and organizations and more "prosumer."

Wang saw the merger as Mindjet gaining economies of scale and also quickly learning how different each business was in how products and solutions were developed, marketed, sold and serviced.

"They do stand out in the world of innovation software platforms," Wang told CMSWire. "There's still a big need for this, and they are now seen as a major player."

Although Mindjet was quiet on forthcoming innovation in its product suite, Wang thinks the innovations will come from more visual and graphical design tools.

Hard Science

Ultimately, Mindjet is invested in delivering insights from hard science that leads to actionable insights.

"While crowdsourcing is an excellent idea to solicit input from all parties throughout an organization, people have found that crowdsourcing alone is not enough," Cochrane said. "... Typically crowdsourcing alone leads to ideas that are gamed or ideas that fail to be put into execution. We've seen people move toward hard science so that you can eliminate that human bias and predictively get the best idea and ultimately ensure those ideas are aligned throughout the organization and actually put into action."

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